One of the most important steps on the way to becoming a profitable independent iOS developer is diversifying your revenue stream. While business lingo like that makes me throw up a little, all it really means is discovering all the ways you can earn money using the platform. New developers sometimes pigeonhole themselves into a single App Store strategy: “Sell as many copies at 99 cents as possible”. More savvy developers mix multiple strategies: “Paid apps”, “In-App Purchases”, and “Advertising”. I want to make sure all developers know about another additional option often overlooked: LinkShare.

LinkShare is a company which pairs publishers with retailers who pay said developers for driving clicks to their sites that result in sales. How does this apply to iOS developers? Luckily Apple (specifically iTunes) is one of the retailers which uses LinkShare. A good FAQ page for the iTunes affiliate program can be found here, but the basic gist of it that you earn a 5% commission on items bought on the App Store from your affiliate links. As an iOS developer you are probably already using links to your apps (and perhaps others) in lots of places, including “More Games” screens, twitter, newsletters, banner ads, or your web site. Replacing all these existing (and future) links to the App Store with your affiliate links is a great start. Retro Dreamer even wrote a nice quick guide to creating links that work seamlessly in iOS (there are some pros and cons to different link formats).

Now you might think the chances of someone actually buying an app you link to are relatively low, but that’s where things get interesting. If you read the fine print it turns out affiliates get paid 5% of any purchases made within a 72 hours after following your link. Lets say Joe clicks on a link to say, Pocket Frogs (our latest free game) which included your affiliate id, which even doesn’t result in a paid purchase even if the app is downloaded. But perhaps Joe ends up buying Angry Birds ($0.99) an hour later earning you $0.05, or Real Racing 2 ($4.99) that night earning you $0.25, or just maybe the Beatles Box Set ($149.00) the next morning earning you $7.45! The cool thing about the iTunes affiliate program is that it gives the affiliate 5% of any and all purchases made through iTunes within 72 hours including ring tones, songs, apps, in-app purchases, movies, tv shows, or rentals.

This of course means you can still earn revenue from linking to free apps, which can end up being a powerful thing. For example, in Pocket Frogs we run a promotion every week where we offer an in game item for downloading a certain free app (with a LinkShare link of course). This not only keeps players checking back, but lets us promote apps we like (like Flower Garden) or even our own. Like most other revenue sources LinkShare isn’t going to make you a whole lot of money if there aren’t that many people clicking your links, but it will certainly grow along with the number of users you have. While the majority of revenue generated from Pocket Frogs (which fluctuates between 150k and 200k daily active users) comes from the IAP included in the game, it also generates a healthy amount of revenue from LinkShare (in conjunction with some links inside other apps) as seen below.

The great thing about LinkShare is that it gives you a lot of freedom on how you use it. It doesn’t use up any bandwidth or take up CPU cycles, and it doesn’t require you to shoehorn 3rd party code into your app. It is as invisible or invasive as you want it to be. So whether you’re a new iOS developer just starting out or an experienced dev, you owe it to yourself to take a look at using LinkShare if you’re not using it already.

This is a new guest post by Frederic My. Frederic and I worked together in the past in big console games development, and now we’re both enjoying the indie life and making games for mobile platforms. Frederic is sharing with us how the development of his first Windows Phone 7 game went. Thanks Frederic!

New beginning

When my job position got terminated last summer, I decided I would take a break from working for big companies, and try to make a game on my own at home. I’ve been in the video game industry since the late nineties, I’ve written code for a few released PC and console AAA titles and probably as many canceled ones, and I wanted to do something different at least for a few months. Go back to the roots of game development, when one or two guys could create something in their garage or bedroom, without spending years and millions of dollars on it.

Platform choice

I’m a C# fan, I won’t deny it, I even explained why back in 2007. I also toyed with XNA each time a new version was released, and I like how straightforward it is to use. When the beta version of the tools to develop for the Windows Phone 7 (WP7 for short) became available, just at the right time for me, it seemed like the obvious choice for what I wanted to do. And developing for a brand new platform sounded exciting as well, even if it was perhaps a riskier bet than targeting well established markets.
For those who don’t know much about WP7 development, I just want to highlight a few key points:

Applications are written in Visual Studio using C#, and either XNA or Silverlight. This may come in the future, but at this point you are not allowed to mix them, and use the controls of Silverlight with the faster rendering of XNA, for example.

In App Purchases are not supported yet.

Programmable shaders are not available for WP7 (they obviously are for the PC and XBox360) in the current version of XNA. Instead, you have 5 predefined shaders with features that can be toggled on and off (such as fog or per pixel lighting). These shaders should cover most of the usual needs, but if you want something very specific that they don’t support, you’re out of luck (or have to fall back to multiple passes and alpha blending).

Paid applications have a trial mode, that allows users to evaluate them before making a purchase. Unlike on XBox Live Indie Games (XBLIG), where the game just abruptly stops after 8 minutes, developers have a complete control over what they want to show in trial mode (for example, the first few levels of a game, with no time limit, or without the ability to save, etc). In theory, this means you shouldn’t have to make a free version of your game in addition to the paid one, but I’ll come back to this later.

The certification requirement document is only 27 pages long, table of content and change history included.

The project

I wrote a few ideas on paper, but they all looked too ambitious for a first project. One thing in particular that I wanted to avoid was to require a lot of content, since I didn’t even know how I was going to find an artist yet. During a bike ride, I thought about using photos, and that’s how I decided to make a jigsaw puzzle game. Not super original, I know, there are several of those on the iPhone and iPad, but there was none on the WP7 since it wasn’t released yet :), and it looked like a good project of the right scope to keep things under control and learn the platform. For example, I had never worked with a touch screen device, and it was pretty obvious from the start that I was going to spend quite some time iterating on the user interface part of the game.
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The game is called Jigsaw Guru, and you can go to http://www.fairyengine.com to see more screenshots and a video.

What went right

I actually already mentioned some of the things that went right in my opinion, but here is the full list:

Working on a short project, without too much content to integrate, instead of picking another more ambitious and time consuming idea, was the right choice. My goal was to have Jigsaw Guru on the marketplace the day of the WP7 launch, I submitted it on 10/18 and it got approved on 10/23 (the update I submitted in December passed even faster than that), two weeks before the US launch and two days after the other territories started getting their phones. At times I still had more items on my to-do list than I would have liked, and I made a good push in the last 3 weeks to get everything wrapped up in time, but it never got too crazy.

Knowing the tools beforehand, and using C# and XNA, definitely made me feel productive. The phone emulator was surprisingly stable in the beta, and the XNA forums were very helpful when I wasn’t sure about something. It’s also worth noting that the website used to submit bug reports allows everybody to see what other people have written, and vote on issues you think are important and should be fixed first.

Garbage collection is the one thing that can hurt your framerate really bad when using XNA on XBox360 and WP7. But it’s not that hard to avoid: when I had a look at my memory usage late in the project, I only found two spots where I was creating some amount of garbage each frame (both related to strings). Basically what I do is each time the player goes from one screen to another, I load everything I need for the new screen, and I force a garbage collection. This gets rid of temporary objects that may have been created during the loading process, and objects from the previous screen that are not used anymore. After that, I don’t allocate anything, and the garbage collector never has to do any work.

Finally: testing. Very few people tested my game while I was developing it, but my friend Alexis alone kept giving me more feedback than I thought I could handle. He never said anything was good just to make me happy, he reported every little detail he didn’t like, even and especially the ones I was aware of but never had time to fix (and maybe thought nobody would notice). Even if I sometimes felt he was nitpicking, this was exactly what I needed.

What went wrong

Developing for a new platform has its share of drawbacks, it’s just how it is. The final version of XNA 4.0 only came out mid-September, and before that I was working with the beta version. As mentioned before, it was pretty solid already, but there was no redistribution of the runtime. Which means you had to install all the tools to be able to just run the game, and you could only install them under Vista or Windows 7 because the phone emulator requires DirectX10, and some of my potential testers were still using Windows XP. So, even if what I was sending was a PC version of the game, they couldn’t run it on XP just because the phone emulator, which they didn’t need, requires a more recent operating system. To work around this problem, I made an XNA 3.1 PC version of Jigsaw Guru, but maintaining two versions side by side for several weeks and merging back and forth between them was not fun.

Coding for a device that wasn’t released yet also meant I could not test what I was doing on real hardware. I unsuccessfully tried to get a phone prototype, and basically the only way I found to run my game on a WP7 at the end of September was to go to a Microsoft event. Even there, I thought there would be phones locked to the tables, that developers could connect to their laptop and use for the whole day, but I was wrong: there was no such thing, and the 4-5 persons who already had a working application to test like me had to do it on the phone of the event’s organizer, when he wasn’t using it for something else. I was able to run my application twice for about 5 minutes each time, and fortunately everything seemed to be working fine, which is a testament of the reliability of the emulator.

When the game began to be really playable, with most of the screens that are in the final version, I started looking for an artist and a musician. I did it way too late, and I was lucky to find Aimee and Tim through the XNA forums, and that the time estimates they gave me just matched my own programming deadline. So, in the end everything worked out well, but even if I wanted to wait and be sure the UI elements were final before asking somebody to redo them, I believe I also waited just because I was more comfortable doing my programming tasks first, and that was a mistake.

Marketing was a difficult problem: I knew I needed to do some, but how? When Jigsaw Guru got approved, the WP7 wasn’t out yet in the US, and had just been released in a few countries of Europe and Asia, as well as Australia and New Zealand. Basically, nobody had that phone yet, and I couldn’t find any website reviewing its games. Even when I had a second look for the US launch, I only saw a couple of sites testing 2 or 3 of the official XBox Live games (that’s how they’re called even if they run on a phone), but nothing related to indie games. So, what ended up happening is I did nothing, and just hoped that because there weren’t too many applications on the marketplace yet (which is the reason for being a launch title, right?), people interested in jigsaw puzzle games would fine mine. Of course I was wrong, and the fact that the search in the Zune software didn’t seem to care about the keywords you enter when submitting your app, or couldn’t find my game when searching for ‘jigsaw’, didn’t help (this seems to be fixed now). I don’t know how other developers releasing WP7 games around the same time as me handled their marketing, but I would be curious to hear it, that question is still a mystery to me.

Downloads and sales

This could have been another paragraph in the “what went wrong” category, but I think this subject deserves its own section. Download and sale numbers for WP7 apps became available on Wednesday 12/08, and I don’t think anybody was thrilled. Don’t get me wrong: WP7 is a very young platform, there aren’t tens of millions of phones in circulation, sale expectations have to be low for now, and can certainly not be compared with those of competing platforms. No, what really surprised me is not the number of sales, but the number of downloads.

On the “top selling” tab of the Zune software (which is more likely based on downloads, like the Bing visual search), Jigsaw Guru has always been in the middle of the paid games from the puzzle & trivia category, the biggest category by far (about 45% of all games). Today for example, it’s 174th out of 363. How many downloads do you think this means on average? About 0.65 per day. This totally blows my mind, but is in line with a graph a developer made with the numbers from his 4 apps, that shows the relationship between the marketplace rank and the number of downloads.

One potential problem is it’s not obvious enough that lots of paid games support the free trial mode, and some players don’t know they can download them for free. But really, it all comes down to most players only checking the XBox Live and the free sections, and rarely visiting the paid one. Which is why although I said earlier that in theory, and thanks to the trial mode, you shouldn’t need to make a free version of your paid game, in practice it’s obvious this doesn’t work, and you have to do it. My friend Noel, who is an experienced iPhone developer, had actually told me I should release my game as a free, ad supported app; unfortunately, the ad SDK’s for XNA didn’t exist at launch and are still in their infancy, the one from Microsoft got released this month and only serves ads in the US, the other ones are either not finished or not stable yet.

So, what’s next? I’m submitting Jigsaw Guru Free (with the Microsoft ad SDK) this week, because as a developer, I still want people to play my game and hopefully have a good time with it. The two projects I started working on after Jigsaw Guru might follow the same path and be free apps from the start, whether it’s on the WP7 or another platform.

Today I have the pleasure to introduce the first-ever guest post in Games From Within, Joey Chang. Like me, Joey worked for many years in the game industry, and finally took the plunge last October to become an independent game developer. Unearthed is his first iPhone project and it’s a very unique free to play, augmented reality (AR) game with an X-Files-like theme.

Joey was kind enough to share the story behind Unearthed, some of the decisions leading up to the final game, and the initial reception and sales numbers. Thanks Joey!

Inspiration

Nine months ago, without warning, a gnome crept into my head. It was an idea inspired from a friend’s chance mention of an activity called geocaching, where participants use a GPS to hide and seek containers across the world. Within hours, I had envisioned a global cross between geocaching, the Amazing Race, and online travel agency representatives. The idea didn’t look much like the resultant product nine months later, but it formed the most critical ingredient to any venture: the obsession to see it completed.

I spent my evenings for a few short weeks hammering out a design, scoping and cutting features, and beginning a prototype, but it didn’t take long for me to admit to the unavoidable truth that such a project would take months working full time or probably 3 to 4 times as many months working nights and weekends. I had to sit and carefully consider the pros and cons of leaving my job to pursue something I desperately wanted to create.

Half-Hearted Dissent

For two weeks, I debated with my wife and close friends with startup experience. I drafted a list of pros and cons to quitting my job to pursue an iphone project and stared at it for hours. Those of you who have made the leap or considered it may recognize some of the points or have more of your own to add:

Advantages of quitting to work full time on an iphone idea

Focus effort, complete project 3-4 times faster

Gain valuable unique experience of running solo

Avoid coding burnout, alienating loved ones, loss of sanity

Resume padding

Advantages of keeping day job while working on iphone idea

Steady income in a scary economy

Not having to job search in a scary economy

Peace of mind (in a scary economy)

You can see where a large portion of the dissenting argument forms its basis. After two weeks of listening to unanimous encouragement (bordering on persistent nagging) to quit my job, two weeks of trying my best to convince myself why I should not quit my job, I did what my gut knew from day one was going to be best for me. I marched to my boss’s room and quit my job. Ok, I had maybe two false starts where I turned around and went back to my seat.

The Project Unearthed

Over the next 8 months, scoping and an inclination to appeal to a casual segment evolved the project into a global paranormal investigation titled Unearthed. I tried my best to figure how to maximize the success of the product, and compiled a list of all the ways I could imagine increasing the product’s exposure:

Banner ads

Spamming blogs and websites to review my product

Spamming friends on facebook

Writing a blog

Viral app features

I had trouble justifying the cost to pay for banner ads, and I had too much urgency to implement the product to devote time to a blog, so I focused on occasionally talking about the app on facebook, compiling a list of potential blog candidates for the day the app released, and devising viral features.

Apart from typical facebook posting and email-a-friend features, I decided to employ a “refer-an-agent” feature which would enable users to invite others to join their network, essentially a grouping of users that correlated with how effectively their app could process scanned creature data. The larger the network, the more credit users would receive for uploading data, and the better they would perform in leaderboards and achievements. The approach was an “everybody wins” style where anytime any user in the network gained a referral, every single person in the network would benefit from the growth of the network. The hope was that this feature would gain a viral quality.

Friends placed immense pressure to release the product as soon as humanly possible under the theory that doing so would reveal the 70% of my design that was wrong, so I divided Unearthed into three releases. The app itself has three game modes, each incrementally accessible as a given region “levels up” from users’ data uploads. I would have time to release the latter modes while the first mode of the game, the most casual mode where users look around where they stand and scan for anomalies, was being played.

In App Purchases and Ads

Considering the App Store was flooded with free apps and that I had no name in the industry to immediately convince users to immediately pay for my app, I concluded that the most likely approach for success was to release a free app with In App Purchases. This appeared to be the best way to get as many users to at least try the app and decide how much they wanted to spend to access more functionality. Initially, I offered the following items:

All content, present and future ($5.99)

Scanner upgrades level 2-3 ($1.99)

Scanner upgrades level 4-5 ($1.99)

Bounty Mode (coming soon) ($1.99)

Blitz Mode (coming soon) ($1.99)

However, I hit a snag with Apple’s terms which did not permit me to even mention any features that were not yet implemented. The first item was intended to be a bulk pricing investment in the forthcoming completion of the app, and the ‘coming soon’ items were just client-side displays to tease of the future modes (not actually registered products in the IAP servers). Because I had to remove them, I revised my IAP content to the following:

Scanner upgrades level 2 ($.99)

Scanner upgrades level 3 ($.99)

Scanner upgrades level 4 ($.99)

Scanner upgrades level 5 ($.99)

Scanner upgrades 2-5 ($2.99)

The app essentially gives users access to all features of the game, but with a lowly basic scanner that doesn’t boast the speed, range, and creature clearance levels of a fully boosted scanner.

I added Greystripe’s ad system as a means to offset the cost I might incur from using Google App Engine as my server solution. Considering the large amount of rank tracking required by my app, I estimated the revenue from ads to break even with the cost of using App Engine.

Release and Reception

The app was approved in the early afternoon of June 21st, a Monday. Excited, I quickly moved up the release date and it hit the stores later that afternoon. One week later, the sales are dismal, with about 400 total downloads and only a handful of purchases.

I considered possible contributors to this could be the following (in order of impact):

Requiring 3GS

Releasing 4 days before the iPhone 4 (dropping off New Releases)

Requiring OS 3.1.3 (instead of 3.1)

Releasing the app in the late afternoon (dropping off New Releases faster)

Without knowing the specifics on the sales of the 3GS versus the 3G and the iPod Touch, the fraction of 3GS users able to even see my app in the store might be a small fraction. Unnecessarily releasing under an OS that prevented users from installing unless they went back to iTunes to update their OS was likely a dealbreaker for browsing users (quickly remedied but days later). And considering how many of the 1.5 million users would be browsing the App Store for free apps Thursday, releasing a few days too early may have been the biggest avoidable mistake yet.

Moving Forward

As uninspiring as it was getting only a few hundred downloads and enough revenue for lunch, I had heard that word of mouth was a powerful vehicle, possibly the best vehicle, for an unknown developer, so my plan is to continue giving it more time and implement the GPS-enabled Bounty Mode which will take considerably less time, possibly a short 1-2 months. One week is certainly not a large enough measure of success, and already I’ve received a few responses from blogs willing to write reviews, so I’m hopeful of seeing the userbase grow and eagerly anticipating the next big server issue. In the coming weeks, there will definitely be no “sitting back while the cash rolls in”, as I recently had the blessing/curse of another inspiring must-create iPad app revelation and am sweating bullets designing and scoping while scheduling in work on Unearthed, all the while keeping a grave eye on the lifeline of my business.

Looking back at the struggling decision I made to quit my job, I’m reminded of some advice that was given to me beforehand. “Quitting your job will be the hardest decision, but it will make you feel great.” And like an enormous burden lifted from me, it did. And to this day, with earned lunch money in hand, it continues to.